Learning about \”Anchors and Anchoring\” is an essential part of every basic NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) training. Unfortunately, most new students seem to have the idea that creating an anchor is a way of creating change, but this is not the case. Anchors do not cause change, in the sense of doing something to revise unwanted wiring and patterning, or of installing something that is desired and new.

In NLP class, it is not uncommon to see a giggling student give another student\’s arm a squeeze in a moment when something amusing has occurred. Although the squeezing student may actually have created an anchor on the arm of the squeezee student, and although this anchor might be worth a giggle, there has been no actual change, other than to mark out a moment of giggling. To effect any kind of change, the squeezer –the setter of the anchor–would have to do something with that anchor once it was created. Anchors are merely handles, or stabilizers, for states and experiences. They give us delayed access (slightly delayed, in the case of most anchors, because they tend to extinguish fairly quickly whenever they are not kept alive) to whatever states/experiences they are the anchors for.

For example, if someone properly anchors an experience called \”confidence\” by squeezing your arm in a moment when you are experiencing \”confidence,\” then we have an anchor for \”confidence.\” Of course, what we really have is an experience of a physical touch that has become associated or paired with an incredibly complex, continually shifting and mixing flow of internal Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, and Gustatory representational events which, for that person in that moment, can be labeled as the experience called \”confidence.\” It is not actual, objective \”confidence.\” There is no such \”thing\” as actual, objective \”confidence.\” There is merely the experience of an experience, and that is what we are calling \”confidence,\” and this state of \”confidence\” can be reactivated the subject\’s neurology, or re-accessed, by firing the anchor for it. However, unless the \”confidence\” is combined with another state or experience, there is no \”change-work\” occurring.

An anchored state is an interesting but pointless phenomenon, unless it is used for something. An anchor is not the state being anchored. An anchor is not the resource being anchored. The anchor is a tool that gives the practitioner access to the state or resource, so that something can be done with it.

Having a tea bag, and even having it handily present, right there at your finger tips, does not actually make any tea. To make tea, you have to do something with the tea bag; you have to put it in the hot water, so that the tea is forced, by physics, to merge part of itself with the water. That is the change in this analogy.

Anchoring usually has one main purpose: to make it possible to combine experiences or states in a way that causes them to remain combined in someone\’s experience, long after the anchors that were used to do the job have themselves extinguished. When anchors of any kind are \”collapsed together,\” states that did not formerly have an association are fired together, and therefore wired together. That is the change-work.

Carl Buchheit, MA has been involved in NLP for over 25 years. He is certainly one of the most cutting edge practitioners of NLP in the world, and has quite possibly the busiest private practice. Carl continues to learn, and integrate what he learns. For more information: http://nlpmarin.com/

Carl Buchheit, MA has been involved in NLP for over 25 years. He is certainly one of the most cutting edge practitioners of NLP in the world, and has quite possibly the busiest private practice. Carl continues to learn, and integrate what he learns. For more information: http://nlpmarin.com/

Author Bio: Carl Buchheit, MA has been involved in NLP for over 25 years. He is certainly one of the most cutting edge practitioners of NLP in the world, and has quite possibly the busiest private practice. Carl continues to learn, and integrate what he learns. For more information: http://nlpmarin.com/

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